Katie is lying on the floor of a seaside house that belongs to her boyfriend's family, at eye level with a cat named Silver, and she has been down there long enough that the light through the window has moved across her arm. Downstairs there is a dinner she is meant to be charming at. She can hear it. Silver rolls over, presents her stomach, declines to explain herself, and is adored anyway. Katie does not get up.
That floor is where Kitten lives. Stacey Yu has written a debut about a twenty-two-year-old who watches a cat get fed, praised, and forgiven for simply existing, and concludes, without ever quite deciding to, that this is the correct amount to ask of the world. Katie is fresh out of college, broke, months behind on rent to the roommate who is also her closest friend, and not speaking to her mother. James, the boyfriend, is generous in the way that makes all the decisions for you. He is not a villain. For the novel's purposes he is something more dangerous, which is comfortable, and comfort is what lets Katie stop moving. Yu writes her interiority in a dry, flat register that keeps undercutting how badly things are going.
The mother is the pressure behind every page she never appears on. Yu builds the estrangement mostly out of what Katie does with her phone: the calls she watches come in, the drafts she does not send, the enormous daily labor of maintaining a silence she is also the victim of. There is a stretch late in the book where Katie cleans somebody else's kitchen with tremendous care, and it is the saddest thing in the novel, because it is the one time she does something for another person unasked and the person is not there to see it. Yu's argument, which she never states outright, is that Katie learned devotion as a debt. Silver is the first creature to take it without sending a bill.
Katie's passivity is the risk the whole novel runs, and it will lose some readers. She does not act, for long stretches. She fails in ways that are irritating rather than dramatic. Around the two-thirds mark the business with the cat crosses over from funny into genuinely uncomfortable, which I am confident is deliberate and which will still put some people off the book entirely. The symbolism goes heavy in a few places as well, where an image that has been doing fine on its own gets explained one sentence past the point of necessity. When Yu trusts the scene to carry it, the writing is very good, and she trusts it more often than not.
Why you should read
- Voice-driven literary fiction about being stalled at twenty-two
- Deadpan narrators who are unreliable about their own lives
- Mother-daughter estrangement written without melodrama
- Book clubs that want an argument about a frustrating heroine
What to expect
- A passive protagonist who resists acting for long stretches
- Comedy that curdles into discomfort by the back half
- Short scenes, dry interiority, very little plot machinery
- An ending that stops mid-motion rather than resolving
Comparisons to The Bell Jar are inevitable and not entirely wrong, though this novel is funnier and closer to the ground, more interested in rent and dinner parties than in grand collapse. Its real subject is what it costs to be loved on conditions at twenty-two, when you are still working out whether affection is something you have to keep paying for. Yu leaves Katie somewhere honest about all that, mid-motion instead of fixed, still capable of the wrong choice. And Silver, who set the whole thing off and understood none of it, is asleep in the good chair in the sun, waiting to see who comes home first.
